The walls lit up again, and replayed the death of the city.
“All right,” she said. “This may take some time.”
And so began Yousra’s life at the edge of the sea. She had spent so long engaged in the act of death that she had almost forgotten what it was like to birth something. It did not take long to realize that the key to unlocking the ships was the blood of the Heroes’ man. Now that she knew he was not one of them, though, she tried to think up another name for him. Boy, Ship, Man, Child . . . Easy names. The names of things. But she could not get them to stick in her mind.
She bled him in the morning, cutting through the webbing the ship had wound about him and carrying it in one of the old water bulbs. Then she would swim down to another of the derelict ships, and pour the blood onto the dais at the center of each, and watch the webbing come down and devour it. The ships woke; lights rippled across their surfaces. Their skins shone. But she could not figure out how to link them. Could the Heroes’ man pilot them all, now that they were away? Could she connect them together, through some kind of umbilical system?
The ships themselves were very much like children. Abused, neglected children buried at the bottom of the sea. She began to learn their fits and starts, their needs and wants. It was why she could not bear to sleep inside the ship where the Heroes’ man stood trapped, because it was clear he had become the ship. Each day she bled him, there was less blood. The outline of his form in the webbing grew smaller and more twisted and disfigured each day. The ship was eating him, devouring him. She hoped some part of his consciousness would go on, but she feared that the ship would simply require more bodies, more death, to power itself.
“I will give you death,” she whispered to her ship one night while the God’s Wheel whirled in the sky. The skin of the ship seemed to murmur beneath her fingers. She took comfort in that. “Will you help me, in exchange for bodies?” she asked. Another ripple. The skin of the ship warmed beneath her fingers.
She slept well that night.
It was months into her life on the beach, bleeding and waking hundreds of ships, that she found the sepulchre. She was scavenging for food in the city, hunting rodents and beetles. Much of her diet was fried grasshoppers and withered tubers. Her gums bled now, and the vision in her right eye was not the best. Two lumps had formed on her ankle, and another on her wrist. She had lacerated the one on her wrist, and it had oozed thick, gummy fluid. Not cancer, then. Perhaps. But it would come for her, out here in the toxic world beyond her village.
She found a rodent’s burrow, and dug into the rubble around it to try and ferret it out. Her stick hit a spongy spot, and poked right through it without resistance. She cleared away the debris and found that the metal over the spongy surface had rotted away. Beneath the metal was a scabby substance, clotted. She dug through it and peered into a great black space. When she pushed her head through, the space lit up with green, bioluminescent organisms. It was a vast space, far larger than she had anticipated. It went on and on.
Yousra slipped down into the cavern. All along the walls, on both sides, ran coffin-like indentations in the fleshy corridors. Inside were bodies, row after row of bodies, their faces serene, their flesh—
Yousra touched one of them. Its flesh was cool, but still pliable.
Bodies. Like a gift from the gods.
Yousra did not think about why they were there, or how to wake them, or how long they had hidden here while their city was destroyed. No, she focused on her goal. She made a sledge and hauled them—one after another—across the dead city and into the sea and into the ships that littered the ocean bottom.
She went to bed smelling of the sea. Tasting it on her lips. Sometimes she thought about the lives the bodies must have had before she had found them, but mostly she thought of her village, and the babies.
The twenty-eighth body she pulled through the ocean and deposited on the dais of a ship woke up.
Yousra saw the eyelids flicker. He began to cough. His skin warmed. She patted the dais and yelled at the ship, willing the webbing to come down faster.
As the webbing crept up over the man’s feet, he began screaming and screaming, babbling at her in some language. She recognized it. The same one the Heroes’ man had used. She did not look away, but met his gaze until the ship wrapped him in its fleshy embrace.
Then she patted the cocooned man and murmured, “You belong to me now, ship. Follow me, and I will keep you fed.”
When she ran out of bodies, she went back to her own ship, and found that the dais that had once contained the Heroes’ man had grown upward to touch the ceiling. His body was gone, absorbed, but the ship had built something in its place. When Yousra pressed the pillar now, the ship shuddered under her touch.
“Let’s find some Heroes,” she said, and the ship rose from the beach.
Yousra stood in front of the pillar, back pressed against it, and pointed to the horizon. “They come from the sky,” she said, “this way,” and the ship moved the way she pointed.
The ship moved across the sea, so fast that they reached the other side in just a few breaths. It slowed as they reached land. Yousra saw a glimmer of silver below, and just as she thought to tell the ship to get closer to it, the ship sank toward the glinting metal.
The metal was not a large ship, not like the ones that had moved over Yousra’s village and destroyed it. It was much smaller, with room for perhaps just a handful of people. Two Heroes stood just to the left of the vehicle, inspecting a tall mound scattered with the detritus of living that a family would leave behind when they fled quickly.
“Destroy their ship,” Yousra said.
The ship around her hummed. Yellow lightning crackled across the surface outside. Then a brilliant flash.
When Yousra could see again there was a great crater where the Heroes’ ship had been. She told her ship to land, and it did, and she walked out to see what she had done.
The air outside smelled like stone after a hard rain. The fine hairs stood up on the back of her neck. The Heroes’ ship had been liquefied, its parts melted down and splattered across the crater. The bodies of the Heroes lay thirty paces away. Their bodies had collided with large trees, and shattered their trunks to pieces.
Yousra made her way to the bodies, her bare feet making prints in the loose soil, and stood over them. One had been run through with a great tree branch with such force that it severed through the suit. The other had lost its head; bits of ship debris had blown clear of the crater and cut the head neatly from the body.
Yousra found the great helmet and picked it up. A head rolled out and settled at her feet. She crouched beside it and turned it over so she could see its face. Blood and bruising mottled the features, but it was not some alien, chitinous thing as she had suspected. Yousra sat beside the body and pulled the gory head into her lap. She rubbed the brow and fingered the braided hair and wondered how a people so like hers could do what these Heroes had done. She had thought them monsters from some other star, but the face in her lap was not so different from the man who had sacrificed himself to power the ship, not so different from hers.
She gazed up into the sky at the God’s Wheel, still faint now in the daylight. She imagined a whole people who had gone up there and come back here to see what had become of their ancestors, only to destroy them for being too weak, too tied to the soil, and the seasons. What they wanted did not concern her, but she mourned the fact that they were able to do what she was about to do, and that what she was about to do was only what she had learned from them.
Yousra set the head beside her and picked up the helmet. It fit her head easily. Instead of tunneling her vision, it gave her a full, enhanced view of her surroundings. Like the ship she rode in, it was transparent here inside of it, so every way she turned, she could see the world, only augmented with symbols and shapes and mists that appeared otherwise invisible. Perhaps these suits detected heat or gases, and gave them form. She did not know, but she could learn, the same way she had learned
the ships.
Yousra had her suit. She had her army. She was ready.
It took a long time to burn down the world.
Yousra would not have thought it would take so long, with so much of it destroyed already, but there was far more of the world than she was prepared for. The Heroes inhabited great swaths of it. Her living army of ships was two hundred strong, and they rose from the sea at her command and destroyed at her word. There might have been a large armada of Heroes’ ships when they first came to Yousra’s lands, and the lands of the man whose people had made the cities. But there was no longer an armada of ships that strong here. What the Heroes had left to mop up what remained of the people here was small in comparison to what Yousra had seen in the vision the ship showed her.
Her army of ships blew their silver vehicles out of the sky, rained molten metal and torn, suited bodies across the world. She traveled over great barren spaces, inhabited by nothing but rocks and dead, rolling weeds. The remnants of thorn fences made for abstract art pieces, scattered and broken across the lands at the edge of the worst of the blight. She found a large fleet of silver ships—thirty, in total—camped at the base of a craggy mountain range, and rained lightning-fire down upon them until the bases of the mountains were coated in molten silver.
As she watched smoke rise up from the dead forests surrounding the camp, she wondered why the Heroes had not destroyed them as she was doing. Perhaps, after decimating the man’s people, hers were not considered a threat. And why would they be? They had no ships, no cities. Just death and disease. No, the Heroes had done something more terrible to them. They had toyed with them, as if they were nothing but insects or rodents. Murdering Yousra’s people would have been too easy. The game was in watching them slowly suffer and die.
Her murdering went on for some time, until she dreamed of steaming craters and molten silver, and woke to see the same. Her ships were taken down one by one, a battle at a time. It did not alarm her, though, because this was the end she expected. This was a war of attrition.
She had just three ships left when she approached the last of the Heroes’ settlements. She had to assume it was the last because she had traveled across the world for days and days and seen nothing but death and ruin and rot. The cancer in her left leg had gotten worse; her ankle had swelled up so big that she walked with a painful limp. A lump in her neck was the size of her fist now, and it pressed against her windpipe as she breathed. She was not long for this world; she was poisoned. This was likely her last camp.
She commanded the ships to fire, but as they did, four silvery Heroes’ ships emerged from the muddy lake bottom. They fired at her ships, downing two. Her ship screamed into defensive maneuvers and fired at them, speeding in and out of range on its own, powered by the will of the man it had eaten. The Heroes’ ships exploded, but the wreckage cloud was so vast that it clipped her ship, and suddenly she was hurtling down, and down, and she hoped this would be her death, a fitting death, ground into the mud with her ship.
Smoke. Heat.
Yousra crawled up through the suffocating flesh of the ship, tearing her way out, sucking for air. Her skin ached and burned and she feared the ship was eating her to save itself.
She popped free of the ship and slid down its surface and into the long poppies in the field. She wore her Heroes’ suit, but not the helmet; it had been wrenched free in the accident.
Yousra pulled off her gloves, as well, because she felt too hot. Behind her, the ship that had led her glorious army burned hot and white. She shielded her eyes and limped away, sucking heated air and smoke.
When she reached the tree line, she pulled off the rest of the suit and cast it into the poppies. It was strange to see something alive, out here, but she had reached the very end of the world, the end of everything. She leaned over and tried to smell the poppies, but her nose didn’t register any scent. She rubbed her smoke-stung eyes. Something moved at her left.
When she turned she saw it was a Hero, her own armor battered and smashed as Yousra’s. The Hero, too, had removed her helmet and gloves. She was a young woman, half Yousra’s age, hair braided back from a lean face that reminded Yousra of Chalifa, the bride from her own village.
Yousra cast about for a weapon, but saw nothing. The Hero had none either that she could see, but would be trained in war, and the only war Yousra knew was fought from inside a ship.
“You deserved all of this,” Yousra said.
She didn’t expect a response, but the Hero said, “It was necessary.”
“Necessary to who?” Yousra said. The Hero spoke with an accent, but not a thick one. They knew her language, at least. Probably that man’s, too, though. It meant nothing. They would kill anything. Knowing her language made them better killers, in fact. “You murdered my people. You murdered the world. What do you have to say to that?”
“We were civilizing you,” the Hero said.
“This?” Yousra said, gesturing to the steaming craters, the dead ships, the dying poppies. “This is civilization?”
“There can be no civilization without war,” the Hero said.
“You are a twisted, corrupt people,” Yousra said. “You have no idea what living is.”
“We had to break your villages,” the Hero said. “Wreck your world. Or you would not walk into the light. You would never explore the stars. You would never come after us.”
“You’re mad,” Yousra said.
“This is what happened to us,” the Hero said. “A people from another star rained fire on us, and lifted us up. We had to lift up another.”
Yousra thought she should feel something. Like the Hero had torn some piece of her. But as Yousra stood before her, barefoot, bloodied, her hair a matted tangle and what was left of her robe a tattered ruin, she realized they had nothing else left to break. It had all been done.
“You wish to break me?” the Hero asked softly. “As you have been broken? I am sorry, dear one, but you are not the first we have civilized. Nor will you be the last. Soon we will rise again, and take another star. An alliance of Heroes the like of which the universe has never known.”
“Heroes . . .” Yousra said.
“Yes, Heroes. It’s fitting, isn’t it? What your kind call us.”
“You don’t know what the word means,” Yousra said.
“It translates very well into our language,” the Hero said. “A Hero is one who not only slays monsters, but creates monsters to slay. That is what we have done here. It’s what you have become. A Hero. Now you, in turn, will make Heroes of others.”
“What if I kill you here?” Yousra said.
The Hero shrugged. “All the better.” She dropped to her knees. “Do it. Complete our mission here. Continue the cycle. Raise up another. Colonize the stars.”
“No,” Yousra said.
“Then we will find another,” the Hero said. “Do you understand yet? You sacrificed a boy to your cause. Murdered babies born wrong. Left men to die outside your fence. And my people, yes, we are people, though we are ruthless, you destroyed us with as much care as if we were insects. This is who you must be, to rule the universe.”
Yousra sat across from the Hero. “I don’t want to rule the universe,” she said. “I want two husbands, eight children, and a village full of friends. You took that from me.”
The Hero leaned toward her. “Take it back.”
“That’s what you don’t understand,” Yousra said. “I am too old to believe it can be returned to me. There is no substitute for my life. You are young, you don’t know that yet. But you will. You should have chosen a younger woman.”
Yousra got painfully to her feet. Her ankle throbbed. She began to walk toward the lake.
“Wait!” the Hero said. “We can cure you. Give you resources. We can give you a whole army. As many husbands as you desire. Have children, surround yourself with a new family. Your people have passed the test of personhood. You are civilized! You can be uplifted now! You are true people, and as true peopl
e, we invite you to join our federation of worlds.”
But Yousra was already at the end of the lake. She kept walking. The water brushed her ankles, cool and calming after all that heat and death. She gazed up at the God’s Wheel in the sky, brighter now as the light withdrew from the heavens.
The Hero was right, in that there was nothing she had not sacrificed to get here. But now, at the edge of the lake, under the eye of the God’s Wheel, she found that after all this time, she did not like what she had become. The choice of what to do now that she could not go back was still hers, and it was a welcome choice, easier than anything she had done so far.
Yousra walked into the lake. It was so clear she could see the ruins in the bottom; the derelict boats and scattered stone animal pens and circular foundations of old houses.
The Hero was shouting at her, but there were no more silvery ships in the sky. No one to save either of them. They were left to their own choices.
Yousra closed her eyes as the water lapped up above her head, and she remembered all those dead babies. The castrated men they thought belonged to the Heroes, the broken cities, and the ships she had melted away.
She could reward herself for becoming this woman, and take the spoils granted. But the spoils were not hers. They were rewards taken from the bodies of others. Rewards built on death and lies and revenge. If that was the universe these people wanted to build, she wanted none of it.
The water was very cold. She swam down and down and looped her belt through a hole in a derelict boat, and when she could stand it no longer, she took a breath, and inhaled cold, clear water, and screamed and screamed into the darkness.
“Run it again,” the girl said.
“It’s just a simulation,” her mother said. The barren waste of the world being terraformed behind them came briefly back into their vision as the headwoman’s watery grave faded from the viewing lens.
“Again,” the girl said. “I want to know if she makes a different choice.”
“She doesn’t,” her mother said. “It’s why there was still a world here at all, when we came back up from the banks underground after our long sleep. If she had chosen differently, we all would have died, or become part of her terrible army. We would have been different people.”
Meet Me in the Future Page 31
